A Winter's Promise

by Christelle Dabos

  Right at the end of the sleeping quarters, Baths Road was engulfed in clouds of steam. The valets were queuing, towels over shoulders, to enter the communal showers. Reeking of sweat was among the job’s taboos. The cacophony of water jets, singing exercises, and insults rang out along the corridor.

  On the other side of door No. 6, which had been double-­locked, Aunt Rosaline couldn’t control her outrage. “Cornets alive, how can you sleep with such a racket?”

  “You get used to it,” murmured Ophelia.

  “Does it never stop?”

  “Never.”

  “This is no place for a young lady. And this room is appalling. Just look at those walls rotting with damp—not surprising you’re always sick! Oh, you’re wincing . . . Is this where it hurts?”

  Rosaline pressed lightly on the rib and Ophelia nodded, gritting her teeth. She had lain down on the bed, not wearing her livery, shirt pushed up, while her aunt’s long, nervy hands were prodding her sides. “Definitely a cracked rib. You’re going to have to rest, avoid sudden movements, and, most importantly, carry nothing heavy for at least three weeks.”

  “But Berenilde . . . ”

  “She’s proved her powerlessness to protect you. You were saved thanks only to that Hildegarde’s honesty.”

  Ophelia opened her mouth, then changed her mind. It wasn’t to Hildegarde’s honesty but rather to her lie that she owed her life. She wasn’t so naïve as to think that nothing would be asked of her in return.

  “Enough playing at being flunkies!” ranted Rosaline. “This whole malarkey has gone much too far. At this rate, you’ll be dead before marrying your maniac of a fiancé.”

  “Not so loud,” whispered Ophelia, with a knowing look towards the door.

  Her aunt pursed her big, horsey mouth. She plunged a cloth into a bowl of cold water, and cleaned up the dried blood on Ophelia’s split lip, gashed forehead, and matted hair. For a long while, neither of them said anything else, and the racket of Baths Road took over.

  Lying on her back, having taken off her glasses, Ophelia couldn’t breathe comfortably. The relief of being alive had slowly given way to a bitter aftertaste. She felt betrayed and disgusted; after what had just occurred, it seemed to her that she couldn’t really trust anyone. She watched the narrow, rather blurred figure nursing her with small, careful gestures. If Aunt Rosaline had had the slightest notion of what had actually happened, first at the chapel, then in the dungeons, she’d have made herself sick with worry. Ophelia couldn’t speak about it to her, as she’d have been capable of doing something stupid and putting herself in danger.

  “Aunt?”

  “Yes?”

  Ophelia wanted to tell her that she was pleased she was there, and that she feared for her, too, but all her words stuck in her throat like stones. Why did she never manage to speak of such things? “Don’t show your feelings to others,” she mumbled instead. “Keep your anger secret, melt into the background, count only on yourself.”

  Aunt Rosaline raised her eyebrows, and her whole forehead, on display thanks to her tight bun, seemed to shrink all at once. With slow movements, she wrung out the cloth and laid it flat over the bowl. “Seeing enemies everywhere,” she said, solemnly, “do you think that’s a tolerable existence?”

  “I’m so sorry, aunt. Try to keep going until the wedding.”

  “I wasn’t talking about myself, silly! I believe it’s you who’s going to live here for the rest of your days.”

  Ophelia felt a knot in her stomach. She’d promised herself never to give up. She turned her head away, and that simple movement hurt her entire body. “I think I need to think,” she murmured. “To be honest, I can’t see things very clearly anymore.”

  “In that case, you can start by putting these on.” Aunt Rosaline placed her glasses on her nose, not without a touch of mischief. The insalubrious little room regained its clean lines, its precise contours, its familiar untidiness. Old filched newspapers, dirty coffee cups, a box of cakes, a basket of clean, ironed shirts—Fox came to see Mime on his every break, and never empty-handed. Ophelia promptly felt ashamed for feeling sorry for herself. Fox had welcomed her the day she’d arrived, initiated her in all the workings of Clairdelune, advised her as best he could, and he’d been there when she’d got out of the dungeons. He wasn’t entirely disinterested, but he’d never tried to harm her, and Ophelia was starting to realize that that was a rare quality.

  “You’re right,” she whispered. “I can already see a bit clearer.”

  Aunt Rosaline passed a caring, rather rough, hand through her heavy brown curls. “Combs alive! Your hair’s in a right muddle! Sit up and I’ll try to untangle it all.” A few tugs later, the “music room” bell rang out from the board above the bed. “Your wicked stepmother and her accursed opera!” sighed Aunt Rosaline. “She can say what she likes, she’s completely obsessed with it. I’ll look after the scores; you, rest yourself.”

  When her aunt had gone, Ophelia decided to get dressed. Better not to hang around for too long with her true face above her neck. Putting her livery back on took much careful maneuvering, but just as well she had: she’d just finished buttoning herself up when there was a knock on the door.

  The first thing she saw on opening it was the giant horn of a gramophone. Her surprise increased when she saw that it was Gail bringing it to her. “Apparently you’re convalescing,” she grunted. “I’ve brought a little music. Hey, can I come in?”

  Ophelia had thought she’d have to deal with her sooner or later, but hadn’t expected it to be that quick. Gail was grinding her teeth and, with the eyebrow holding her black monocle in place, she frowned in annoyance. She was wearing a simple shirt and dungarees; all the valets emerging from the showers and lavatories were whistling as they passed behind her. It didn’t show when she wore her usual baggy overalls, but the mechanic was pretty curvaceous.

  Ophelia indicated to her to come in and locked the door behind her. Without wasting a second, Gail put the gramophone on the small table, carefully took a record out of the bag slung around her, placed it on the turntable, and cranked up the mechanism. Deafening brass-band music filled the whole room.

  “The walls have ears,” she explained, in a low voice. “This way, we’ll be able to speak at ease.” Gail dived onto the bed as though it were her own, and lit a cigarette. “Woman to woman,” she added, with a mocking smile. Ophelia let out a resigned sigh and sat down on a stool, slowly so as to spare her ribs. She suspected that the mechanic had seen through her.

  “Don’t put on your timid act,” insisted Gail, her smile widening even more. “I bet you’re no more mute than you are male.”

  “Since when have you known?” Ophelia then asked.

  “From the first moment. You can fool everyone else, my sweet, but not the Gail.”

  The mechanic blew her cigarette smoke out through her nose, her electric-blue eye fixed on Ophelia, who was much more disturbed than she wanted to show.

  “Listen,” she spat out through clenched teeth, “I know what you must think and that’s why I’m here. I’m not responsible for the trap you fell into. Incredible as it may seem, I didn’t know those oranges were poisoned. I don’t know what went on, but me, I never wanted to cause you any trouble. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

  The brass-band music from the gramophone covered her tense voice so well that Ophelia was struggling to hear her.

  “I know who you are. Or at any rate, I’m assuming I do. A little new girl who has to dress as a man to serve the haughty Berenilde? You can only be the fiancée of her nephew, whose arrival here everyone’s waiting for. You hadn’t even arrived, and already everyone hated you, you know that?”

  Ophelia blinked in agreement. Oh yes, she knew it. Thorn’s enemies had become hers, and he had a daunting number of them.

  “I find that disgusting,” continued Gail, after taking a fresh dr
ag from her cigarette. “I know what it does to one to be hated for being born into the wrong family. I’ve been watching you from the start, and I thought you were going to be eaten alive. That’s why I wanted to recommend you to my boss. The oranges, they’re a kind of code between us. I swear to you that I was sincere when I told you she was different, that she’d accept you as you are, without judging you.”

  “I never doubted your sincerity,” Ophelia assured her. “How is Mother Hildegarde doing?”

  Gail’s monocle almost popped out. “You’ve never doubted me? Well, I don’t know what more you’d need!” She stubbed her cigarette out on the iron bar of the bed and immediately lit herself a second one. “The Mother will soon be up and about,” she said, shaking her match out. “She has a constitution of steel—the poison that will kill her hasn’t yet been invented. Her allergy story wasn’t very believable, but then, the important thing is that she exonerated you.”

  “Why did she do that?” asked Ophelia, cautiously. “Does she know who I am, too?”

  “No, and she’ll only know if you decide to tell her. I won’t interfere anymore, you have my word of honor.”

  To Ophelia’s great regret, Gail felt obliged to underline the pledge with a giant gob of spit on the already far from spotless floor of her small bedroom. “I still don’t understand why your Madam Hildegarde helped me out. After all, nothing proves that I didn’t try to poison her. All the appearances are against me.”

  Gail sniggered between her teeth. She crossed her legs, shamelessly displaying her heavy, dirty footwear, and the bedsprings creaked in unison. Her dungarees were stained with coal dust and oil; Ophelia would definitely have to change the sheets after her visit. “Because, as you say, all the appearances are against you. By poisoning the oranges, you’d have been sentencing yourself to death. And also, the Mother has the weakness of trusting me, and me, I have the weakness of trusting you. Without wishing to offend you, you’ve got the lovely face of an ingénue.”

  Ophelia stiffened on her stool, checked with a quick glance at the mirror that she still had Mime’s neutral appearance, and looked back at Gail, astounded. “You see me as I actually am?”

  Gail puckered her lips, hesitating, and then raised her eyebrow and took out her monocle. It was the first time Ophelia was seeing her left eye. It was as black as the one on the right was blue. Heterochromia. Gail had a tattoo on her eyelid, a bit like the Mirages did.

  “I work in the service of Mother Hildegarde, but I was born here. I’m the last survivor of my clan. Have you ever heard mention of the Nihilists?”

  Ophelia, gripped by these revelations, shook her head.

  “Hardly surprising,” Gail continued, wryly, “as they all died about twenty years ago.”

  “They all died?” asked an ashen Ophelia.

  “A strange epidemic,” said Gail in a mocking tone. “That’s the way of the court . . . ”

  Ophelia gulped. It certainly sounded like a sordid business. “You escaped it.”

  “By passing myself off as a little, insignificant servant, exactly like you today. I was a kid at the time, but I’d already understood many things.” Gail took off her cap and shook her short, dark hair, which fell over her face in an unspeakable mess. “All the minor nobles are little blondies, me included. We get that from Farouk, our very badly named family spirit. I manage to go unnoticed by dyeing my hair black. If my presence here became known, I’d be dead before I could tighten my final nut and bolt,” she added with an amused grin. “I uncovered your secret, I reveal my own to you, seems fair to me.”

  “Why?” whispered Ophelia. “Why would anyone seek to kill you?”

  “Look at yourself in the mirror.”

  Ophelia frowned, and turned again to her reflection. To her great astonishment, this time she saw her real face, covered in bumps and bruises, with big eyes staring out from behind a pair of glasses. “How do you do that?”

  Gail tapped her tattooed eyelid. “I only have to look at you with my ‘evil eye.’ I’m a Nihilist. I cancel the power of others and your livery is a pure Mirage concoction. You can understand why I prefer not to scream it from the rooftops.” She put her monocle back in place and Ophelia became Mime once again on the mirror’s surface. “This special lens prevents me from cancelling all the illusions I lay my eyes on. It acts as a filter.”

  “A bit like the gloves of a reader,” murmured Ophelia, looking at her hands. “But you unmasked me despite your monocle. Does it then allow you to see what’s hiding behind illusions?”

  “My family used to sell plenty of them,” grumbled Gail in a cloud of cigarette smoke. “The Mirages didn’t appreciate everyone being able to see all that their little tricks conceal. Our monocles mysteriously disappeared along with my entire family . . . I managed to save only this one.”

  With these words, she brought as much hair as possible over her eye and rammed her cap down as far as possible. Ophelia observed her as she finished her cigarette in silence. She understood that if this woman’s features were so hard, it was due to all the ordeals she’d gone through. She sees herself again through me, thought Ophelia. She wants to protect me as she would have liked someone to protect her.

  Suddenly, Ophelia felt her heart racing, right up to her throat. The sisters, cousins, aunts she knew; Gail was the closest she had to a very first friend. Ophelia would have liked to find a fitting phrase, words strong enough to express the immense gratitude overwhelming her, but she decidedly wasn’t good at that kind of thing.

  “It’s very nice of you to trust me,” she stammered, ashamed not to have found anything better to say.

  “Your secret against my secret,” grunted the mechanic, stubbing out her cigarette. “I’m no angel, my darling. If you betray me, I’ll betray you, too.”

  Ophelia pushed her glasses up her nose, a gesture she could finally allow herself in front of someone. “Fair enough.”

  Gail got up with a creaking of bedsprings, and cracked her knuckles like a man. “So what’s your real name?”

  “Ophelia.”

  “Well, Ophelia, you’re not as insignificant as you seem. But I’d still advise you to make a courtesy visit to my boss. She lied for you, and she can’t stand ingratitude.”

  “I’ll try to remember.”

  Indicating her gramophone with her chin, Gail smiled with a grimace. The brass-band music hurt the ears after a while. “I’ll bring you some other records. Get well soon.” She tweaked the brim of her cap in farewell and slammed the door behind her.

  The Trust

  Ophelia lifted the arm of the gramophone to stop the deafening music. She double-locked her door, took off her livery, and stretched out on her bed, which now reeked of motor oil and cigarettes. Facing the ceiling, she let out a deep sigh. She’d been duped like an idiot, beaten with truncheons, threatened by a corrupt butler, and astounded by a fallen noble. That was a lot of trauma for one little person.

  Ophelia realized that she was going to have to speak to Thorn that very evening. Her heart started pounding painfully against her ribs. She dreaded seeing him again. She still wasn’t entirely sure what had really occurred the last time, and still hoped she’d got the wrong idea, but Thorn’s attitude had definitely been ambiguous.

  Ophelia was scared, viscerally scared, that he might have grown fond of her. She felt incapable of loving him in return. She certainly didn’t know much on the subject of feelings, but for that alchemy to work, didn’t a man and a woman need to enjoy a minimum amount of affinity? Thorn and she had absolutely nothing in common, and their two temperaments were incompatible. The exchange of their family powers, on the day of the wedding, would change nothing.

  Ophelia chewed away at the seams of her glove. She’d been discouraging to Thorn. If he felt rejected once again, would he continue to offer her his support? She was still going to need it, today more than ever.

  She
got up carefully and passed a hand through the mirror in her room. While Ophelia’s body remained at 6, Baths Road, her arm was penetrating inside the wardrobe at the Treasury, on the other side of Citaceleste. She could feel the thickness of the coats. Thorn had said he would close the door of the wardrobe if he was consulting. Ophelia knew he could receive visitors until midnight, it was doubtless still too early.

  She pulled back her arm. All she could do now was wait. She lowered the flame of the gas lamp, curled up under her sheets, and soon drifted off into a restless half-sleep. She dreamt she was imprisoned in a huge, white sandglass, and every grain that trickled down resounded like a veritable thunderbolt. When she awoke with a start, her shirt soaked in sweat, she realized that what she’d been hearing was just the tap dripping in her basin. She drank a little water, wiped her neck with a damp sponge, and plunged her hand back into the mirror. This time, she could push her arm through up to the elbow. The wardrobe at the Treasury was open.

  Ophelia had second thoughts as soon as she saw her reflection in the mirror. She had on a simple shirt and short hose, no shoes on her feet, and her long, brown hair flowed freely down her back. Entering Thorn’s room looking like this wasn’t a great idea. She had to rummage about in her mess to find the big coat he’d lent her. She buttoned it up from top to bottom, and rolled up the flapping sleeves. It wouldn’t hide the bruises on her face, but would at least look more decent.

  Ophelia darkened the lenses of her glasses to conceal her black eye, and then tipped herself, all in one go, into her reflection. The cold instantly took her breath away. She could see no further than the end of her nose. Thorn had turned off the heating and switched off the lights. Had he gone, leaving his wardrobe open?

  Ophelia waited until she’d got used to the surrounding darkness, her heart pounding. The bull’s-eye window, at the back of the room, allowed a little moonlight to filter through the feathery frost. She was starting to distinguish the outline of the large desk, the lines of the shelves, the curves of the seats. Beneath the bull’s-eye window, there was a silhouette, all hollows and angles, seated on the sofa, totally still. Thorn was there.